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Tuesday, March 15, 2011

This week, we're playing the second in a short-lived adventure series: Mega-Venture II: Top Secret Adventure, published by Big Orc Software. The game bears a 1984 copyright, and there's no author credited onscreen, but in the binary code we find a credit to Jim Veneskey, author of the previous game in the series, Romulan Adventure. Again, this game uses the Bruce Hansen engine, modeled after (and compatible with) the Scott Adams system.

Top Secret Adventure is a spy adventure, a bit of a James Bond parody with a humorous bent. It opens on a busy city street, where a nearby telephone is ringing with great portent. Our mission, we learn upon answering, is to defeat the villainous Dr. Yes, who intends to rule the world by means as yet undetermined.

This is a fairly difficult adventure, and I had to dig into the code to figure a few things out. If you intend to play on your own, I advise you to go forth and do so now, as continuing here will likely cause you to find this tale of espionage and sabotage...

***** SPOILED, NOT STIRRED ******

The opening phone message tells us, "Dr. Yes is up to his tricks again on Dog Mess Island. It's up to you to stop him - Permanetly[sic]!" So this is definitely a James Bond parody, though the joke seems to have lost its way somewhere between the author's original idea and the final, perhaps bowdlerized, result; Dr. No was stationed on Crab Key island.

We can LOOK PEDESTRIANS on the city street, yielding, Hey! It's Rodney Dangerfield! This seems like a simple 80's pop culture reference, but we will actually need to return here later, at which time we will show the American comedian an appropriate degree of no respect.

We have some Money in inventory at the start, but there seems to be no way to find out exactly how much we have. But the in-game (and, one presumes, completely unauthorized) Sears Store sells camping supplies; we can RING BELL to summon the salesman, and BUY SUPPLIES to exchange our money in total for a small boat, a small tent, and a camp cot.

There's a dock down the way, and across the ocean we can make out a Far away island. We can DROP BOAT and GO BOAT, discovering that the small vessel contains oars (though it's impossible to GET them.) A little parser wrestling provides our next challenge -- GO ISLAND doesn't work, nor does ROW BOAT, but the response to this attempt provides a hint -- Row WHERE? -- and ROW ISLAND does the trick. We can't, of course, simply row all the way there -- after one round, we're too tired to continue. But we need to REST and then ROW some more; SLEEP is fatal due to a sudden bout of pneumonia.

The first puzzle we discover onshore is fairly complicated. We have to drop all inventory items to climb the nearby palm tree and obtain a coconut. But there's a Sleeping Puma a few locations to the south, and once visited, the animal wakes up and starts following us as the newly-christened Angry Puma. And in this situation, it's not long before Puma Rips me apart! I'm dead. If we manage to climb the palm tree again, the animal starts pawing at the tree, but we are unable to carry any useful weapons with us. What we should have done, it turns out, is leave the tree alone until we have roused the puma; then we can DROP COCONUT from the tree to turn him into a Conked out Puma. There's really no way to tell we need to do this when we first arrive on the island, and we can't get the coconut back up the tree once we've brought it down, so this puzzle tends to require a replay. Fortunately, the program provides a competent SAVE GAME feature, with ten available slots for each player (using the first two letters of the player's name, given to the game at startup.)

The coconut's initial purpose is served, and we can use the shovel formerly guarded by the puma to open it up and find, oddly, an automatic Luger pistol concealed within. Digging in the sand also yields a box of 8 9mm shells, so now we're properly armed and, as subsequent events will imply, licensed to kill.

A nearby building features a front door and a basement window. If we enter through the door, we can explore the house, collecting a few useful items discussed in greater detail below. Entering through the window leads to a Musty Basement with a Washer & Dryer, and an unspecified number of Goons, who immediately gun us down.

Soon it starts Getting Dark!, and it develops that we can't just SLEEP in, say, the living room, as the building is apparently woefully under-insulated, and we still catch pneumonia and die. To get a safe night's sleep, we have to DROP TENT, GO TENT, DROP COT, GO COT and SLEEP (which only uses one move, oddly enough.) There's a note in the tent, in classic adventure tradition, that promotes the next game in the Mega-Venture series: Gamma World Adventure, coming this Summer (circa 1984).

The house has a den, a dining room, and a kitchen with a Cupbard [sic]. Fortunately, the parser allows us to spell this one correctly, and LOOK CUPBOARD works to find a Battery. There's a bookcase in the den, but we can't GET BOOK (I don't see it here) or LOOK BOOKCASE. We have to LOOK CASE to find the book, and again to discover a lantern. The book is titled "How to Rule the World Using Weather," and written by Dr. Yes, providing some details about his allegedly nefarious plan.

We can also enter the Warm basement from a staircase inside the main part of the house, and LOOK FURNACE to yield Strange, It does'nt [sic] seem to work... We can now also enter the musty basement without running into the Goons, though there's nothing there we need. We can INSERT BATTERY, which then allows us to LIGHT LANTERN. We can UNLIGHT LANTERN as well, but due to a bug the battery continues to run down anyway, so there's not much motivation to do so.

I got stuck here for a bit -- on my first play, I somehow failed to notice Dr. Yes running down the stairs after I entered the house. On my second try, I looked around downstairs to no avail, despite my best efforts to MOVE FURNACE, OPEN FURNACE, MOVE WASHER, MOVE DRYER, GO FURNACE or otherwise discover a secret passage. I finally delved into the game data, raising the useful question of how I might create the opening in Furnace mentioned there. And experimentation finally established that we can KICK FURNACE and GO OPENING, though we can't take the resultant scrap metal, which is too bad as such material always seems useful in adventure games.

While trying to figure that out, I did a little experimenting with the Luger. We can go back to town and ROB RODNEY, showing him absolutely no deference, regard or respect whatsoever, replenishing our Money again, though at the time I had no apparent reason to do so. Mr. Dangerfield runs off to summon the police, and will presumably need some time to get them to take him seriously, so we have time to make ourselves scarce and return to the island. We can also SHOOT PUMA to turn the conked-out creature into a Dead Puma. Both of these actions have value, but not until later in the game.

A panel in the room beyond the furnace features red, black, and green buttons. I started out by trying to PUSH RED, and learned that CYANIDE Gas jets in! That was the wrong way! I'm dead. PUSH BLACK appears to produce no effect, but this is a two-step process - we always have to push the black button before pushing either the red or green button. PUSH GREEN yields Were moving! (are we not now? ... ah, that should read We're) and takes us down to a subterranean lake; PUSH BLACK, PUSH RED takes us back up from below.

We can now GO LAKE and SWIM DOWN, but we can only last five turns underwater without air, and even if we swim back up to the surface, the death index still counts down; it only resets if we actually go back to shore. After many, many experiences of I CAN'T BREATH! [or spell!] I Drowned! Glub! Glub!, I dug into the data and discovered that there must be some way to get to the bottom of the lake. The small boat is mysteriously non-functional in the lake -- we can carry it here, but GO BOAT yields Sorry / Not HERE.

I mapped out the lake, to the extent I could before drowning, but found no interesting new locations, so I went elsewhere and tried a number of other ideas. SCORE yields Sorry, Not in this Adventure. We can create paradoxes; if we DIG again on the island after we have removed the 9mm shells from the Box, we see that the Box and the Empty Box can somehow coexist, as can the Lantern that's on and the Lantern. We can't SEARCH, apparently, but the word SCUBA is recognized by the parser, and some scuba gear would certainly come in handy, if we can find it... ah, yes! We can BUY SCUBA in the Sears Store, if we have relieved Mr. Dangerfield of his cash, even though this available item is not advertised. I doubt I would have guessed this without peeking at the dictionary.

A quick WEAR SCUBA suffices to equip us for a proper dive, and we can reach the bottom of the lake (it's an arduous seven-turn swim down), where we find an Airlock and a Great White Shark (hungry!) that immediately attacks and kills us. This presents another interesting puzzle. If we drop the conked out puma in the water, it awakens, kills us, and swims to shore. But if we SHOOT PUMA, then drop its corpse in the water, the water ripples, a shark appears, eats the puma, and then kills us. We actually have to return to shore immediately after dropping the puma, then we can SHOOT SHARK from a safe distance. It's another one of those puzzles that has to be explored first, then solved after a restore; a priori knowledge of the shark's existence is required.

With these mighty foes killed off for good, we can swim back down and go through the airlock into an underground hallway. A cave to the east contains Scared Bats; apparently our reputation for animal cruelty precedes us, but we need not harass these little fellows. What we need to do is venture into the adjoining Deep Dark Pit. But we don't yet have the proper equipment.

Nearby, we can enter Dr. Yes' Weather control chamber, and there's a massive storm brewing -- if we enter too hastily, the wind shoots us through a hole in the ceiling and smashes us to bits outside! What we need to do, after another RESTORE, is WAIT outside the room until the storm moves on. There's really nothing to do inside the weather chamber, however.

Now we can turn our attention back to the pit. We need to return to town, and steal some rope from the ROPED OFF CRIME SCENE where we earlier robbed Rodney Dangerfield; fortunately, we can simply GET ROPE without attracting any further attention from the authorities. No respect, indeed! But back at the pit's edge, it turns out that we can't CLIMB ROPE or CLIMB PIT or CLIMB DOWN, and DROP ROPE just places it near the pit. We can try to LOWER ROPE, but Whoops! Rope fell into the Pit! Another dive into the code reveals that we need some wood to build a rope ladder, and it turns out that the palm tree on the shore has been smashed by the storm, bowing under the unstoppable force of our patience.

This next bit is random and aggravatingly so, so I strongly advise using the SAVE GAME early and often. As we enter the aptly-named Goons Room, they kill us right away, again. We have to let them go to sleep with a WAIT, then go in and kill them while they're asleep; this isn't entirely consistent, and it seems that sometimes we have to go to our own cot and SLEEP also before they will be suitably off-guard. We also need to be careful to explicitly SHOOT GOONS -- SHOOT GOON leaves one alive long enough to take us down.

Beyond the Goons, the villainous Dr. Yes awaits in the Master Control Room, though he isn't nearly as much of a threat as I anticipated. A blue lever in the adjacent reactor room turns the reactor off and on. We can shoot the bad Doctor if he doesn't randomly shoot us first; actually, there seems to be a bug here, as sometimes he's able to fall to the floor dead, then shoot us. But if we have survived that bit, Dr. Yes pulls a lever as he falls to the floor, which doesn't seem to do anything, really. We can LOOK CONSOLE to find a Large Red Lever here, which turns off the Coolent [sic] Pump.

Once we have the coolant pump turned off and the reactor on, we only have 37 moves left before the reactor goes critical. And though we have considerately killed off all the other living things on the island, it develops that simply getting off the island ourselves isn't enough. We actually have to get back to the dock and safely inside the Sears Store, which has apparently armored itself extremely well against the holiday doorbuster crowds. We can make it there, but there are only a few moves to spare, and we end up traversing most of the game's world in the process, so good mapping is very important.

As a suitably Hollywood finale, The Reactor Blows itself to hell! And despite the radioactive fallout we have almost certainly unleashed upon the planet, victory is ours!

I am very much enjoying the Mega-Ventures, in part because I never knew they existed back in the day, and this one has some puzzles that are more complex and detailed than expected for a two-word parser adventure. To save others from beating their heads against the puzzles that sent me scurrying into the code for cheating purposes, I will provide a full walkthrough below the fold; it's also available at the CASA Solution Archive.

(SAVE GAME here, as this seems a bit random. You may be able to WAIT a few times, or you may have to go through the whole tent/cot SLEEP routine again; you want to enter the Goons Room to the north while they are asleep!

To sleep:

GO TENT
DROP COT
GO COT
WAIT
SLEEP
GET UP
GO OUT

)

N

SHOOT GOONS

(Now that they're dead, SAVE GAME again; Dr. Yes can randomly shoot you; if you have trouble here, try using the tent and cot to SLEEP again)

2 comments:

That was definitely my nastiest adventure - even I died playing it - and I wrote the darn thing ;-)

The Adventure System (TAS) was awesome - you could quickly go back and forth between the editor and the engine to check your changes.

I'm actually amazed that anyone besides myself and my friends ever played it. I wrote those adventures trying to encourage my friends to write some of their own for ME to solve, since it's really no fun playing your own adventures. Challenging (in my case) but not really fun.

Good to hear from you! I found this one challenging but not as tricky as your third game, Gamma World -- I'm pretty close to having it finished, I think, but haven't quite gotten there yet! Getting the radiation suit to the other part of the map seems to be my main challenge. Thanks for stopping by!